If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Does A Greedy Intel Driver Improve Performance?

04-15-2009, 04:30 PM

Phoronix: Does A Greedy Intel Driver Improve Performance?

As we have outlined before and shared benchmarks of in the past, the Intel graphics driver stack has been going through some significant changes. The Intel graphics driver now has a proper memory manager in the form of the Graphics Execution Manager, there is upstream kernel mode-setting support, and a new 3D component is coming soon in the form of Gallium3D. With all of this invasive work going on, regressions are currently prevalent from stability problems to graphical corruption to slower 2D performance. While these are problems users will face with the new distribution updates in H1'09, some have been trying out different driver configurations in order to circumvent the situation. Canonical, for example, had been toying with the idea of enabling greedy migration heuristics by default.

Comment

For arm-chairing -intel integration strategy, also keep in mind performance is just one parameter. Stability can be an even more important concern (ruling out UXA), as is providing the latest support for newest chips (which makes 2.4 a less useful option).

Also, performance can vary from chip to chip, so while it is very nice having solid quantitative facts to judge from, they may differ noticeably on other intel hardware.